A flexible solution to empower the Arts Council and arts organisations across England

About The Project

Industry

Not-For-Profit

Service

CMS Development

Technology

Drupal

Quick Results

167%

Increase in goal completion

153.33%

Increase in conversion rate

75.13%

Decrease in application abandonment

3

Month initial build time

About the Client

Arts Council supports cultural activities across England in arts organisations, museums and libraries. Their website serves as an authority on arts and culture and provides a space for job listings and community blogs.

Between 2015 and 2018, the Arts Council have invested £1.1 billion of public money from the government, and an estimated £700 million from the National Lottery, to help create art and culture experiences for everyone, everywhere. Their website acts as a secure hub for groups to apply for this funding and helps groups around the country to realise their potential.

Business Challenge

Arts Council’s website and CMS capability didn’t afford the control and flexibility they needed. The rigid website content management system meant that editors were unable to tailor the structure and content on web pages in order to communicate their messages effectively.

Therefore, over the 3-month project, we focused on delivering two main areas of improvement:

Project Highlights

Flexible Content Management System

Through Continual Development, we implemented a new flexible, modular component-based CMS. This provides more control for the content managers at Arts Council.

Drupal’s modular content management system utilises paragraphs that allow editors to create text, input images, embed videos and more. The component-based design removes barriers to entry for contributing to the website. It also removes the need for coding knowledge when editing content on web pages, and reduces dependency upon developers, allowing clients to keep publishing in-house.

With Drupal’s native support for capturing content in a structured manner through Content Types, we incorporated fields tailored to suit specific needs. We created Content Types for the new Landing Page and Homepage, with the later addition of a Blog Landing Page.

These provided the skeleton for a basic page, including elements like: title, introduction and URL. Beyond that, we provided the ability to assemble pages from a set of available component styles. With these templates, content editors can ‘build’ compelling and interesting pages, whilst maintaining consistent brand integrity.

The components we created were:

Home Page Gallery

Showcase

Double spotlight

Featured content

Full Text

Header

Navigation Spotlights

Navigation Spotlights List

Quick links

Slides

Spotlight element

Each component type can be added to a page any number of times, in any order. Additional components can be developed in the future as the organisation's content requirements adapt and change. These guides help content editors to publish in-house, while complying with accessibility and usability standards almost subconsciously.

User-Centred Navigation

We take a user-centric approach to all of our projects. To create a navigation structure that delights users, it must be built with them in mind. Therefore, in late 2017, we asked almost 100 everyday stakeholders of Arts Council to take part in creating the navigation. We used Card Sorting and Tree Tests to find out what users expected from the navigation and applied their opinions to best practices, ultimately creating the best navigation for everyone.

Individuals were asked to journey through the existing navigation in order to reach specific pieces of information; this is called Tree Testing. We investigated which areas they clicked on the most, how successful they were at finding the information, and how often they had to backtrack to find the information.

Card Sorting was then used to give insight into how users structure information in their own mental models. Users were asked to sort cards containing the topics on Art Council's navigation, to discover what areas they associated with each other. As a result, we were able to discover which topics were most often associated with other groups and which topics were considered too similar. This also provided insight to review the names of topics where their purpose was often misconstrued.

In addition to providing the premise of the global site navigation, these activities also presented the basis for the on-page navigation.

We implemented three forms of on-page navigation, to function as a secondary aid to the global navigation. On each page, content managers can set the following criteria, to help users get the most out of their visit:

the breadcrumbs of the page

the content spotlights

the footer carousel

Application Optimisation - Eligibility Self Assessment Test

The application process for funding on the Arts Council website previously experienced a high abandonment rate. The existing form was unclear about what was needed from applicants before they started. As a result, the primary method of grant application received thousands of incomplete submissions each year.

To improve the process, we designed an eligibility gateway that encourages users to confirm whether they have all of the information they need before starting the process. Ultimately these pre-application details make the experience more efficient and enjoyable for users.

Each funding type is now separated and provides four key areas of information:

Key information - the status, dates, and type of grant

About the fund - more information about why the fund exists and who it’s from

How to apply - eligibility information and FAQs

Successful applicants - previous examples of how the grant has benefited projects around the country

The Arts Council Eligibility Quiz

Scalable Support During High Traffic

Mid-year, Arts Council release the successful funding grants for the next period causing a potential influx of traffic. We implemented a scalable, cloud-based hosting solution to provide Arts Council with extra support during these times of peak traffic. The solution will scale up virtual instances during peak trading periods and scale them down again automatically, with zero downtime.

Quality Assurance (QA) Testing

All of our projects undergo rigorous testing, throughout the software development process. In order to deliver the utmost quality for clients and their respective users, our in-house QA team ensure that all end products perform accurately and reliably under normal and abnormal conditions. Testing is followed by continual monitoring of software performance, to prevent reoccurrence of any issues and to ensure efficient ongoing operation.

As such, we were able to confidently deliver a well-designed, scalable and technically stable result.

Results

The successful interface changes to the applications funnel have achieved a total abandonment decrease of -75.13%, from 90.3% to just 22.46%.

Whilst maintaining a consistent level of traffic YOY, goal completions have risen by a massive 167% with a conversion rate increase of 153.33% from 12.32% to 31.21%.

We provide both Critical and Reactive Support to the organisation, becoming the extension of their digital team. This ensures maximum availability when they need support. They also benefit from an ongoing allowance for developing and implementing a roadmap of digital initiatives, via our continual improvement service.